Citrix Disaster Recovery in Azure for (almost) Free!

To follow up on my previous blog about the Cloud First world we live in, I thought it would be helpful to highlight an area where the cloud offers a great AND low cost solution for Citrix disaster recovery. The costs of having workloads in the cloud are typically the largest obstacle for our customers to start the journey to the cloud. Citrix teamed up with Microsoft to deliver an option that reduces cost for production workloads and almost eliminates cost for disaster recovery.

How does it work?

The costs of running workloads in the cloud fall into a few buckets. There are the compute costs, which is the cost you pay when the virtual machine is running and is based on the instance size of the virtual machine. There are storage costs, which you pay 24x7 based on the storage tier and capacity. And there are networking costs, which generally are associated with site-to-site connections and the egress of data from cloud to customer networks or the internet.

For disaster recovery, the compute and network costs were already low or non-existent for virtual desktops. There are typically some ongoing costs for ancillary servers or perhaps connectivity, including things like personalization replication, NetScalers, and replication of data. But, for virtual desktops there had always been a recurring cost for storage (usually the expense of SSD storage too!). Since the storage was allocated even if the desktop wasn’t running, there was still a significant cost.

Citrix and Microsoft created a feature called “On-Demand Provisioning.” The solution is designed for non-persistent desktops, and changes the behavior so the storage is not allocated for the non-persistent desktop until it is powered on. When it is powered on, the proper temp drives are attached on the fly and the image is delivered via MCS in Azure. With this feature, a virtual desktop only costs money if it is powered on.

What’s the impact?

Below is some quick modeling to give you an idea of the costs before Azure On-Demand Provisioning for a VDI environment.

Number of Desktops

Drive Size in GB

Cost Per Desktop Per Month*

Total Cost Per Month

Total Cost Per Year

1,000

64

$4.80

$4,800.00

$57,600.00

1,000

128

$9.60

$9,600.00

$115,200.00

10,000

64

$4.80

$48,000.00

$576,000.00

10,000

128

$9.60

$9,600.00

$1,152.000.00

*Prices as of this writing.

With On-Demand Provisioning, storage costs for DR are only incurred if you declare a disaster recovery event, in which case you will also pay for compute and network. But you only pay for them while they are running and not when they are powered off waiting.

How can I take advantage of it?

This feature is built into Citrix cloud and is available in Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktop 7.17 and up. It is automatically enabled when you deploy a machine catalog up in Azure for a non-persistent workload using MCS.

Contact Gotham Technology Group to launch you on a cost effective and strategic path to the cloud.

Brian has over ten years’ experience in the planning, design, and implementation of technology solutions. He supervises technical specialists at projects, and has spoken at many technical seminars. Brian is an application integration specialist with experience configuring over 1,000 applications to work in multi-user environments, and manages Gotham’s thin client and server consolidation practices.